For my store I have always been very adamant about all of the props being life-size. I believe it is much more realistic and therefor scary. 15″ adult skeletons just do not seem scary to me. Throughout the store we have many full size animatronics. Customers love it when the butler says something to them as they walk by or the werewolf rattles it’s chains. It freaks them out and it even catches us off guard at times too. All of the life-size creatures say something or move around in some way except one. The one I am referring to is the Grim Reaper or as we affectionately call him: Grimmy. No object scares us more than old Grimmy. He is far and away the best prop we have and he doesn’t even move or speak. He will make me jump out of my skin at least a couple of times a week. I tried to find him online, but it seems the exact one we have is no longer made. I did find a very close version of him that I think would still have the same effect. I highly recommend you get him for any decorating you plan to do for Halloween. He’s a little expensive, but trust me you’ll get more bang for your buck with this Grim Reaper than any other screaming or moving prop you can find.
In my bookstore we have an area dedicated to a mad scientist’s laboratory. This was so much fun to put together and can be easily used in your Halloween display or haunted house. You can always buy the premade stuff shown below, but that can run into a lot of money. What we did was buy some of the premade things that we couldn’t easily recreate and mixed it in with the things we could.
Start out with some test tubes and a rack that you can buy from places like American Science and Surplus. You can fill these with water colored with food coloring or if you are afraid of them spilling you can also do colored geletin. Buy some jars in varying sizes or save the jars you empty in the kitchen which is even cheaper. These jars can be filled with all sorts of things. Like a plastic bloody brain or eyeballs that can be purchased cheaply in any halloween store. You can even get more creative and hit the grocery store. We actually used matzo balls in one jar. If you prepare some clear geletin and put it in each jar the items will appear to float, which we found makes them much more creepy. Buy a toy microscope which usually comes with some accessories which can be used as well. In the dark you can’t tell the difference.
Place a couple of boxes in various sizes around your table to add some height. Put a black cloth over the table and boxes. Now arrange all of your props together making sure to put some things on the boxes. Add a skull or two and a hidden colored light and you have yourself a creepy laboratory display.
If you are putting together a haunted house you have to include a library. What’s a spooky house without a library holding some of the scariest books ever written? If you want to put in that extra bit of spookiness though, you need these haunted books. In my bookstore I have these set up in between the books for sale. They are motion activated, so when someone is standing there looking at books or walking by it sets them off. The Beast Within the Books prop on the right pops open up to show the little monster with eyes that light up. It shakes and and makes some spooky sounds. With the Possessed Books prop on the left one of the books slides out back and forth and makes some spooky sounds. After using these two items for two years I have a few things to say about them. First off they work great. They don’t go off every time which is actually nice. You can’t depend on it to go off when you want it to. In the end it makes it more of a surprise. The down side of these is that they are quite noisy. Not the sounds they are supposed to make, but the mechanical sounds they make. If there is a lot of general noise though, this shouldn’t be a problem. The nice thing about these is that they are just plain scary, not gory so it’s good for the little ones as well. 
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